The de Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures

The de Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures
Author: Martin Berg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-11-29
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9783110792249

How does automation affect us, our environment, and our imaginations? Conversely, what should we do about automation? Besides grand narratives and technology-driven design visions of the future, what else can automation provide? With these questions in mind, The De Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures provides a framework for thinking and doing automation differently while consolidating automated futures as an inter- and transdisciplinary research field. It embeds the imaginaries, interactions and impacts of automation technology in their social, historical, societal, cultural, and political contexts. Scholars and students can use the handbook to imagine, realise and anticipate the possible futures of automation while learning about and engaging with these futures ethically and responsibly. The handbook promotes an agenda that is critical yet constructive and engaging by inviting readers to work with rather than resist automation agendas. Rather than being limited to assessing and evaluating already developed technologies, the handbook illustrates how the humanities and social sciences are essential to the design and governance of people- and planet-centric sociotechnical systems. A fundamental pedagogical approach underpins the handbook. It examines how co-learning and co-creation can be staged and analysed with, rather than for, people and stakeholders and encourages readers to engage in new and alternate modes of research.

The De Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures

The De Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures
Author: Vaike Fors
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2024-09-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3110792346

How does automation affect us, our environment, and our imaginations? What actions should we take in response to automation? Beyond grand narratives and technology-driven visions of the future, what more can automation offer? With these questions in mind, The De Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures provides a framework for thinking about and implementing automation differently. It consolidates automated futures as an inter- and transdisciplinary research field, embedding the imaginaries, interactions, and impacts of automation technology within their social, historical, societal, cultural, and political contexts. Promoting a critical yet constructive and engaging agenda, the handbook invites readers to collaborate with rather than resist automation agendas. It does so by pushing the agenda for social science, humanities and design beyond merely assessing and evaluating existing technologies. Instead, the handbook demonstrates how the humanities and social sciences are essential to the design and governance of sustainable sociotechnical systems. Methodologically, the handbook is underpinned by a pedagogical approach to staging co-learning and co-creation of automated futures with, rather than simply for, people. In this way, the handbook encourages readers to explore new and alternative modes of research, fostering a deeper engagement with the evolving landscape of automation.

The De Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies

The De Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies
Author: Anthony Elliott
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2024-07-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3110721759

The De Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies examines the relationship of the social sciences to artificial intelligence, surveying the various convergences and divergences between science and technology studies on the one hand and identity transformations on the other. It provides representative coverage of all aspects of the AI revolution, from employment to education to military warfare, impacts on public policy and governance and the future of ethics. How is AI currently transforming social, economic, cultural and psychological processes? This handbook answers these questions by looking at recent developments in supercomputing, deep learning and neural networks, including such topics as AI mobile technology, social robotics, big data and digital research. It focuses especially on mechanisms of identity by defining AI as a new context for self-exploration and social relations and analyzing phenomena such as race, ethnicity and gender politics in human-machine interfaces.

Frictionlessness

Frictionlessness
Author: Jakko Kemper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2023-12-14
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN:

Frictionlessness provides an examination of the environmentally destructive digital design philosophy of "frictionlessness" and the critical significance of a technological aesthetic of imperfection. If there is one thing that defines digital consumer technologies today, it is that they are designed to feel frictionless. From smart technologies to cloud computing, from from one-click shopping to the promise of seamless streaming-digital technology is framed to host ever-faster operations while receding increasingly into the background of perception. The environmental costs of this fetishization of frictionlessness are enormous and unevenly distributed; the frictionless experience of the end user tends to be supported by opaque networks of exploited labor and extracted resources that disproportionately impact the Global South. This situation marks an urgent need for alternate, less destructive aesthetic relations to technology. As such, this book examines imperfection, as an aesthetic concept that highlights existential conditions of finitude and fragility, as a particularly powerful counterweight to the dominant digital design philosophy of frictionlessness. While frictionlessness aims to draw the user's perception away from the exploitative and destructive conditions of digital production, imperfection forms an aesthetic source of friction that alerts users to the fragile nature of technology and the finite resources on which it relies. These arguments are elaborated through a close reading of three technological objects-a video game that was programmed to expire, an audiovisual performance that laments the fate of disused technology and a collection of music albums that dramatize a techno-cultural logic of relentless consumerism. Together, these case studies underline the value of technological aesthetics of imperfection and point to the need for a renewed ethics of care in relation to technology.

The Road from Damascus

The Road from Damascus
Author: Robin Yassin-Kassab
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2008-06-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0141918519

It is summer 2001 and Sami Traifi has escaped his fraying marriage and minimal job prospects to visit Damascus. In search of his roots and himself, he instead finds a forgotten uncle in a gloomy back room, and an ugly secret about his beloved father... Returning to London, Sami finds even more to test him as his young wife Muntaha reveals that she is taking up the hijab. Sami embarks on a wilfully ragged journey in the opposite direction, away from religion – but towards what? As Sami struggles to understand Muntaha’s newly-deepened faith, her brother Ammar’s hip hop Islamism and his father-in-law’s need to see grandchildren, so his emotional and spiritual unraveling begins to accelerate. And the more he rebels, the closer he comes to betraying those he loves, edging ever-nearer to the brink of losing everything... Set against a powerfully-evoked backdrop of multi-ethnic, multi-faith London, The Road from Damascus explores themes as big as love, faith and hope, and as fundamental as our need to believe in something bigger than ourselves, whatever that might be.

Trading Zones of Digital History

Trading Zones of Digital History
Author: Max Kemman
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2021-10-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110682257

Digital history is commonly argued to be positioned between the traditionally historical and the computational or digital. By studying digital history collaborations and the establishment of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, Kemman examines how digital history will impact historical scholarship. His analysis shows that digital history does not occupy a singular position between the digital and the historical. Instead, historians continuously move across this dimension, choosing or finding themselves in different positions as they construct different trading zones through cross-disciplinary engagement, negotiation of research goals and individual interests.

Everyday Automation

Everyday Automation
Author: Sarah Pink
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2022-05-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 100058335X

This Open Access book brings the experiences of automation as part of quotidian life into focus. It asks how, where and when automated technologies and systems are emerging in everyday life across different global regions? What are their likely impacts in the present and future? How do engineers, policy makers, industry stakeholders and designers envisage artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making (ADM) as solutions to individual and societal problems? How do these future visions compare with the everyday realities, power relations and social inequalities in which AI and ADM are experienced? What do people know about automation and what are their experiences of engaging with ‘actually existing’ AI and ADM technologies? An international team of leading scholars bring together research developed across anthropology, sociology, media and communication studies and ethnology, which shows how by rehumanising automation, we can gain deeper understandings of its societal impacts. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Digital Roots

Digital Roots
Author: Gabriele Balbi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110740281

As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The second one is related to Agency and Politics and explores global governance, datafication, fake news, echo chambers, digital media activism. The last one, Users and Practices, is finally devoted to telepresence, digital loneliness, amateurism, user generated content, fandom and authenticity. The book aims to shed light on how concepts emerge and are co-shaped, circulated, used and reappropriated in different contexts. It argues for the need for a conceptual media and communication history that will reveal new developments without concealing continuities and it demonstrates how the analogue/digital dichotomy is often a misleading one.

The Cumulative Book Index

The Cumulative Book Index
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 2248
Release: 1996
Genre: American literature
ISBN:

A world list of books in the English language.